Lofty aim and high ideal, the cultivated endeavour of good citizenship, loyalty to aspiration, courage, self-respect, and the noble living of life; they had also spoken of these things together--there in the golden gloom of the old-time parlour when she was fourteen and he master of his fate and twenty.
But there came into his life a brilliant woman who stayed a year and left his name a mockery: Malcourt's only sister, now Lady Tressilvain, doubtfully conspicuous with her loutish British husband, among those continentals where titles serve rather to obscure than enlighten inquiry.
The wretched affair dragged its full offensive length through the international press; leaving him with his divorce signed and a future endurable only when his senses had been sufficiently drugged.

In sober intervals he now had neuritis and a limp to distract his mind; also his former brother-in-law with professions of esteem and respect and a tendency to borrow.

And drunk or sober he had the _Ariani_.

But the house that Youth had built in the tinted obscurity of an old New York parlour--no, he didn't have that; and even memory of it were wellnigh gone had not Constance Palliser spoken from the shadows of the past.
He lifted his glass unsteadily and replaced it.

Then slowly he raised his head and looked full at Constance Palliser.
"It's too late," he said; "but I wish I had known that you remembered." "Would you have built it, Jim ?" He looked at her again, then shook his head: "For whom am I to build, Constance ?" She leaned forward, glancing at the unconscious Hamil, then dropped her voice: "Build it for the Boy that Was, Jim." "A headstone would be fitter--and less expensive." "I am not asking you to build in memory of the dead.